16 Jun 2013

When Your Dead Blog Dies

My webserver fell over last week. I bought the hardware from a guy
across the continent on eBay for plus shipping more than 3 years
ago. It ran all my course wikis, handled my personal website and a
few other tasks it picked up for my friends as a dedicated webserver
back before there was a cloud. Until it failed, the hardware had run
for 1172 days without so much as rebooting, thanks to the unparalleled
stability of free software, and my all-too-paralleled recklessness as
a system administrator.

10 Mar 2010

Mozilla Revises MPL

Earlier today, the Mozilla Foundation announced its process for revising MPL 1.1, in a public comment-driven process lasting until the fall.

I like their process announcement, which proposes a reasonable schedule and workflow. The Foundation has clearly studied the GPLv3 process, and has drawn good conclusions about what worked for us, and what will work better for them if done differently. They’re using Co-ment, the wonderful Web-based text annotation system designed and implemented by Philippe Aigrain and his colleagues at Sopinspace in Paris. They helped us design the Stet system we used for GPLv3, and they’ve gone far beyond it with Co-ment.

The MPL has been an influential free software license, but I agree with the unstated proposition of the Mozilla Foundation that it’s now showing its age. I think this is precisely the right time to be doing the revision, and I wish the Mozilla folks a smooth, thoughtful, and successful process. I hope everyone who cares about the health of Web, and about free software licensing, will register and get involved. SFLC and I will be doing whatever we can to help. And I sure look forward to being an insignificant minor player this time around…

14 Dec 2009

The European Commission and Oracle-Sun

I spent last Thursday and Friday in Brussels, attending the European Commission’s Oral Hearing in the competition investigation of the acquisition of Sun Microsystems by Oracle. The proceedings at the Oral Hearing were confidential; I cannot write about the presentations made there by others. I can, however, summarize the three points I made during my brief presentation on Friday; my previous written submission to the commission is already available. I want to explain what I said and where I think we stand now that the Oral Hearing is over.

03 Nov 2009

Bilski

SFLC and I recently filed a brief in Bilski v. Kappos, along with plenty of other lawyers, and I gave a talk about the case, and the future of patent law, at Cardozo Law School yesterday. The outpouring of amicus briefs in this case, which will be heard by the Court on November 9, must be particularly noticeable to the Justices and their law clerks: a stack of dozens of third-party briefs seeking attention would have been the lunchtime talk of that inner core of the Court back when I worked there, and I’m pretty sure that hasn’t changed. A high stack of amicus briefs—which we called “greens,” for the color of the cover in which the Court requires they be bound—means people outside the Supreme Court think the case is important. Bilski is very important indeed. The Supreme Court and Congress must soon begin shaping patent law for the 21st century. In Bilski, the Supreme Court has an excellent place to start.

09 Sep 2009

Microsoft Feeds the Trolls

An announcement
by the Open Invention Network has disclosed publicly for the first
time another, previously-secret front in our community’s efforts to
protect itself against anti-competitive aggression by Microsoft.
OIN’s transaction with Allied
Security Trust to buy patents, supposedly reading on free software,
offered to the troll market by Microsoft prevented what could have
been a very unpleasant experience for the whole free software ecosystem.

Selling patents to organizations that have no purpose except to bring
litigation—entities which do not themselves make anything or
conduct any research, which do not indeed contribute in any tangible
or intangible way to the progress of civilization—is not
standard commercial practice. What Microsoft is really doing here is
sowing disruption, creating fear, uncertainty and doubt at the expense
of encouraging the very sort of misbehavior in the patent system that
hurts everyone in the industry, including them.

I’ve explained
before why Microsoft doesn’t want to sue on its patents, and why
it expends so much effort on keeping secret its efforts to bully
enterprise users and redistributors of free software into buying a
“Linux license,” for some large but unspecified number of patents it
claims are infringed by free software. Selling patents to trolls
allows Microsoft to escape the judgment of its largest customers.
They don’t want to see free software destroyed. They resent
Microsoft’s attempts to reduce their freedom of choice. They are also
learning that they cannot, in the present economic climate, continue
to pay monopoly prices for software less good than the code our
community makes and lets everyone share.

Our community—including all developers, distributors and
users—owes Keith Bergelt of OIN, and the companies on his board
of directors, a round of serious thanks for interrupting this arms
trade, and calling attention to a bad business practice. The
commercial members of our community have done what only they can do:
they’ve provided the resources to prevent one business from
systematically exploiting the pathologies of the patent system to harm
us all. But mutual defense means everybody has to help. Richard
Stallman and I spent years warning that the patent system carelessly
applied to software could be exploited to inhibit freedom and
institutionalize monopoly. Many business organizations that used to
think we were probably wrong are now sure that we are right. They are
doing what they can to defend the community. But the responsibility
still rests with us all.

The pressure of public opinion on Microsoft, amplified by the
attention of the regulators in Europe and the United States, is
significant. We need to speak out loudly now, in response to public
erdisclosure of Microsoft’s stealthy patent war, and demand a real
patent peace treaty. The tactics of threat and intimidation should
stop. The sale of ammunition to the trolls must end. If these unfair
practices don’t stop, everyone’s interests will suffer.

11 Aug 2009

On Wikis in Teaching Law

Over the last two years I have built the wiki-based platform for
teaching law school courses that I, as one particular teacher, need.
Because it was built out of free software tools that are simple,
general and flexible, anyone could at no cost adopt mine as is, change
them to suit her own needs, or start again to build something more
appropriate to different styles of instruction. But I’m intentionally
not talking about technology choices now. Anyone who looks at the courses herself can
learn all she wants to about that in a click. Here I want to talk only
about teaching and learning.

10 Aug 2009

On Returning to Blogging – At Fifty

I pretty much gave up writing personal essays for the web after I
founded SFLC; just when RMS & I were getting ready for the making of
GPLv3. It seemed to me then that everything I thought about from day
to day was subject to attorney-client privilege, or was the internal
business of SFLC, or was a diplomatic statement that shouldn’t be
anticipated by a personal blog. I think institutional blogging is
invaluable, and I love what my colleagues do at softwarefreedom.org, including
the podcast. My
course wikis at
Columbia are experiments in teaching conducted whth my students &
former students that are teaching me every day. I live in the web.
But writing about the various things that matter to me, in real time,
in the constant process of trying to hope efficiently that all of us
could have more freedom? That’s a habit I had gotten out of.

23 Apr 2007

And Now … Life After GPLv3

Not that it wasn’t wonderful. I enjoyed almost every minute of it,
and I’m going to write about the ones that can be told, some day. But
for me and for my colleague Richard Fontana, after months of living
and breathing GPLv3, the weather’s beginning to change.

The release of Discussion Draft 3 has been greeted as warmly as I
dared hope: all the recorded outrage has been emitted by Microsoft or
its surrogates, which is at it should be. We had prepared Discussion
Draft 3, after all, with the assumption that it was going to be the
Last Call Draft, and I thought, and continue to think, that it would
serve beautifully as the final GPLv3. I agree with RMS that it was
very important to add another cycle of public discussion, and I’m sure
the Free Software Foundation will be making some changes based on that
discussion, as it has in response to comments all along. But I think
the big issues have been correctly addressed, and that the detail
work-which as lawyers we have to take more seriously than everyone
else–is ready for the pressure of reality.

So it’s time I began to think about life after GPLv3.

Making the license is just the first phase, to be sure: SFLC and its
clients will be using the new license before long. Lots of people
have speculated in the press about who isn’t going to switch from
GPLv2 to GPLv3. However, I’ve seen much less speculation about
developers who might choose to drop other licenses in order to put
their projects or commercial products under GPLv3. In fact, in my
travels around the GPL-revision process this year I’ve met and talked
to many such people. Their views were also taken into account in
framing GPLv3, and I’ll bet there will be some notice taken late this
summer and early autumn, when interesting and high-profile projects or
products change licenses to adopt GPLv3, or dual license under it. And
a license once applied to software must be respected; our clients’
copyrights are used to protect freedom, and we will need to help all
our GPL3-using clients to get the same respect for their intentions
that other free software and open source projects receive.

But this long drafting project, which has displaced most of the rest
of my professional life (and, it sometimes seems, all of my personal
life as well) is winding down at last. Which means it’s time to return
to some of what I’ve missed. Writing and teaching, for example. Time
to reorganize time. As I return to teaching at Columbia I need to
concentrate more of my remaining spare time and effort on the affairs
of the Software Freedom Law Center, which is inevitably going to mean
less involvement with the affairs of other organizations I care very
much about.

In particular, it’s time for me to leave the board of directors of the
Free Software Foundation, where I’ve been since 2000. FSF is in great
shape under the continued leadership of Richard Stallman and his
executive director, Peter Brown. Completing GPLv3 successfully
underlines the credibility with which FSF combines the most
uncompromising principle with the depth of knowledge and experience
needed to build broad coalitions in our community. Leaving is always
hard, but there couldn’t be a more appropriate or less disruptive
time.

More than anything else, however, this is a moment to focus on the
new. SFLC is a wonderful place to work, for me and I hope for all my
colleagues. Great things are happening that haven’t had enough
attention, because everyone has been watching GPLv3. The really
innovative work is being done by the other lawyers here. They are
refining organizational structures, innovating strategies for setting
up “project conservancies”–a new type of shared container for
multiple free software projects –which gives those projects
administrative and legal advantages with minimal overhead. They are
counseling young projects making astonishing new free software that’s
going to be rocking business’s world three or four years from
now. We’re taking risk out of projects everybody is using or is going
to want to use. Helping my colleagues do that work, supporting their
growth as they support their clients, is the right thing for me to do
right now.

13 Feb 2007

Away from the Troubles of GPLv3

I know everyone thinks that I have given up even the semblance of
maintaining a blog, and given what GPLv3 has done to my ability to
communicate what I am personally up to in my life, I probably have for
the moment. Eventually that massive license negotiation will be
complete, and I will only have to cope here with the required discretion
necessary for the ordinary practice of law, not also the conduct of
industrial diplomacy.

But here’s something we can all take 4 minutes and 31 seconds to
appreciate; one of the most lucid pieces of artful public instruction
I’ve ever seen. I don’t know of any existing honor appropriate to the
merits of this work, but when humanity begins offering the Ted Nelson
Prize, I hope Professor Michael Wesch wins one of the early ones.

A Renewed Invitation to Kernel Developers

To begin with, I welcome the current expressions of opinion by kernel
developers. As I have repeatedly said in private communications, and
will now say again publicly, I will gladly take any steps possible to
include the kernel developers in the ongoing discussion process. I
invite them to represent themselves in any way they choose, and pledge
to work with them to create, even at this late date, a form of
participation in the deliberations about GPLv3 that would reflect
their preferred means of work, and be appropriate to their position in
the community of developers.

I appreciate the positions taken publicly by the kernel developers.
To be clear, the process of deliberation in which FSF and everyone
else has been engaged since January is not only a process of taking
positions. It also involves listening to the positions others have
taken: it’s the effect of listening as well as talking that gives
deliberative democracy its effectiveness as well as its legitimacy.

I have been doing a job this year, on behalf of the Free Software
Foundation as a client of the Software Freedom Law Center. In this
time, I have watched hundreds of serious-minded and busy people take
time to listen to one another’s needs, to explain their principles, to
deliberate on the arrangements that affect their lives. For my
colleagues and fellow citizens who develop the Linux kernel, I have
nothing but respect. I ask them please to join the conversation that
is going on, to listen to others whose views may not be theirs, and to
help the community make the best possible choices about matters of
deep common concern.